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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.
Happy Halloween to all who celebrate! I’ve got a very special episode to round out this month’s Hauntings micro-series: I’m sharing a piece of my own short fiction — a ghastly little tale that takes place in the American West in the late 1800s — and I’m especially thrilled to bring you this story in collaboration with the amazing and multitalented Kaitlin Bruder — performer, comic artist, illustrator, graphic designer, soundscape creator, and producer of the Thin Places Radio podcast, which just launched Season 2 a few weeks ago.
So, Thin Places Radio, or TPR for short, is one of my favorite podcasts of all time, and if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’ve heard me talk about it a lot. I recommend it so, so highly for anyone who enjoys short-form audiodrama and fiction, or eerie things, or tender things, or mysterious things, or all of the above, actually [chuckles] — and I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with Kaitlin and her TPR co-creator Kristen O’Neal here on Little Oracles a couple of times, in a Creative Chat with the two of them, back in Season 1, and with Kristen in a chat about the comfort of horror, among other things, just this month — and I’ll link both of those episodes in the show notes, as well as Thin Places Radio. Don’t miss their podcast; it’s creepy and heartwarming all at once, and it’s just so beautifully curated.
Now, in the past, when I’ve had other folks contribute to the the show, it’s been as guests, of course, so they get to hype their own current projects and share their own social handles and things like that, but Kaitlin isn’t here in the flesh — hopefully she’s here in spirit, though [laughs]; it would be fitting for our micro-series theme — but since she’s not here, I’m gonna do it for her. Kaitlin is just one of these people who can do it all, and can do it with such aplomb and enthusiasm and joy, and I am just criss-crossing my little fingers that we can work together again very soon, but if you wanna check out Kaitlin’s work yourself, you can find her portfolio and her social handles on her website at bruder kaitlin dot com — that’s B-R-U-D-E-R-K-A-I-T-L-I-N dot com; and I’ll link that in the show notes — and, of course, you can listen to Thin Places Radio to hear her amazing soundscapes, and to hear her production capabilities just really shining through in every episode. Kaitlin, honestly, is a supergiant in- in my mind, and I feel so fortunate to have had this opportunity to collaborate with her directly. She has created a spine-tingling soundscape for this story that I’m about to share; it’s just so immersive and atmospheric, and it takes the story to an entirely new level, and I couldn’t be more excited for what we’ve put together for you.
So, a couple of content warnings for our scary story: this story references blood and gore; gun violence and animal harm; and supernatural menace, so if those things aren’t your things, I totally get it; please feel free to skip this episode, or come back to it later. I just want you to take care of yourself and do what’s safe and sound for you.
I will be back to close out this episode after the story, but for now, let’s get into this very haunted Halloween reading.
Penitence [Short story by Allison Arth; soundscape by Kaitlin Bruder]
I counted three deputies, blurred in the dusk of the day, from where I crouched concealed on the soft side of a cedar felled by lightning, disheartened by their progress and by my predicament. I watched as their horses stepped ginger down the ridge through the deep-piled Ponderosa needles me and that pilfered Paint pony had sifted through an hour or so previous — rather unsuccessfully, and may that equine rest in peace.
Frankie Frazier used to call this part of the evening the Ghoul’s Hour: this purple shift between daytime and nighttime. She’d said This was the time when infernal harriers would move amongst the living, sometimes disguised, sometimes not, but always feral and ferocious.
You can assay a haunt, she’d say, when it calls your Christian name in the night.
How’ll they know your Christian name? I asked once.
Devil’s gonna tell ’em once they make it down to Damnation. He’s got a roll of everyone that wronged you, and that Old Scratch, he loves his tit for tat, she’d said.
I figured she was trying to shock me into some kind of loyalty with this odd concoction of retributive mystagoguery, and though I’m not saying I was scared, I nevertheless kept my full name to myself, as a safeguard against the sacred and the accursed, and so everyone — save Frankie, of course, for she knew me completely, outways-in — but other than her, every last soul, from outlaw to law-folk and all them betwixt, knew me as Lennie, and Lennie alone.
Now, of course, Frankie Frazier: she was dead of a bullet to her head, not twelve hours ago, in the unexpected events that ensued during our stick-up at the Briarville Savings & Loan, which means that, if I concede her spiritual cosmology, she might be out there right now, prowling in the guise of some yellow jaguar, waiting to take down those deputies, given they shot her, and were now enroute to retrieve me and the satchel full of gold we stole. Should that come to pass, it would certainly relieve the how-do-you-do in which I found myself, but since I’m neither spiritualist, nor skeptic, I couldn’t lever any kind of prediction.
I kept eyes on the deputies for as long as I could, leastways until they blended into the trees at the bottom of the ridge; I couldn’t hear them yet, but I would soon. I turned and pressed my back into the cedar stump, the satchel wedged in next to me. The stump jutted up jagged behind, edged in old char, the softening trunk crumbling at the touch where it nursed new sprouts, sundry fungi, and a host of termites. On any other day, I might call this place peaceful, but on this day, as I contemplated the natural dissolution against which I leant, and the man-made degradation oncoming from those deputies, I wondered: what is peace, if not a counterpoint to doom?
So, indeed, I was low. Thanks to the burdensome satchel, likewise my rough-grazed and leaking right side, courtesy of an unlucky shot — or, perhaps it was lucky; like so many things in life, that particular determination depended on one’s personal allegiances — I hadn’t gotten far on foot. O, how I wish I still had that Paint pony! I’d nabbed him from the corral out back of Marvelle’s Card House, a place I avoided after what-all transpired there with Frankie a few years ago, and as I was in an absolute state following the much-ado at the bank — following that look Frankie’s face held after her body went down, a hollowness, as though what made Frankie, Frankie had already drifted away, as smoke — but as I said, I was in an absolute state, and so as I lit out alone, one of those deputies delivered me a bullet, and between that, and my hard-heeled riding, and the gloaming, and the pitch of that ridge behind me, my mount was altogether frenzied, such that he busted a foreleg, and I had to put him down with what turned out to be my last bullet.
The deputies would presently cross the body of that dead horse, still warm; and surely they heard the pistol report careering around these woods like some short-clappered death knell. They’d know I was close, running, hiding, it didn’t much matter, as I was no doubt dotting the terrain with a trail of blood that would lead them right to me. All I really had on my side was the failing light, or the falling night, depending on your perspective; that, and my hunting knife, a gift from Frankie back when she cut in with me and the band of miscreants I ran with at the time, just a grubby old bunch, pressing pistols into the curving backs of drunks, or thieving at the dry goods store to kit out our camp — we were petty, but we were organized.
One evening, Frankie strode up to where we squatted in our squalorousness on the outskirts of town, her dressed in that fine wool suit — all three pieces, and that bowler hat with the spray of silk lilacs tacked to the front — and here we were, utterly mired, us who only bathed on occasion. She always said folks Preferred to be held up by a gentleman rather than a lout, and then offered us a job that she said Could truly raise us up from the muck in which we found ourselves day in and day out: a simple safe-jacking, she’d said, with us relieving Marvelle’s Card House of its weekly yield via the building’s rear entrance, while she in her mannered finery manufactured a distraction in the front of house over a rigged game of whist.
We agreed when she quoted the profits we stood to gain, but trouble was, she picked the wrong mark for her part of the play: a U.S. Marshal by the name of Henry Crook (bit of an ironic name, considering). Frankie caused a fuss, and Crook hustled her right to the back office where me and my crew were unfettering the safe — except I was outside with the buckboard, holding the horses until we were all of us ready to run. I heard all that commotion, with Frankie and them carrying on, so I high-tailed it out of there, figuring it’d be better if at least one of us remained uncaught. They sent Frankie and the boys for correctional stints, and I imagine it was awful, though when Frankie got back to Briarville, she wouldn’t say a word about it, and those boys, they never came back at all. She assimilated to me and my new crew like nothing were amiss, though she did intimate a few times that she had her eye on me personally, saying things like Isn’t it funny the way the Devil deals, with us all going in, and just you getting away.
It was her who’d come up with the job at the Savings & Loan: just the two of us, she’d said, to attain higher profits and confirm certain assurances, whatever those might be. But when the whole thing went awry; when it turned out there was not one, but in fact three deputies stationed in the bank that very day, and Frankie, who’d been on watch at the front door, came tearing inside soon as the shooting started, a look of outright alarm on her face, her pistol still holstered, and her hands up as if to say Hold your fire! as she ran between me and the lawmen: that’s when the bullet met her, and she met her maker before she even hit the floor. I fell to the ground in the tumult and when I saw her — rather, when I saw her face in all its vacancy — I snatched those silk lilacs, new-stained with the blood soaking her bowler hat, and I hefted the satchel and ran through that chaos of shouting and sulfur, just trying to escape with the gold, and with my life.
And escape I did, though to what end, now those deputies were so hot at heel, and my pistol empty, and my wound oozing, and my two boots no match for their three steeds? But Frankie in her sardonic wisdom used to say Hope is no more than desperation dressed up for dinner, so I took up my hunting knife, and I wrapped the handle with that crushed and soiled spray of lilacs — for what? a memento? a ward? a talisman? I couldn’t say, only it was all I had left of Frankie — and I slid down low as I could beside the cedar, ready for whatever awaited me.
And that’s when I heard them, though they weren’t creeping like I’d imagined. Instead, they were shrieking, and I heard an animal scream, a peal that shredded the twilight, loud as a mountain lion and twice as malicious, and those deputies howling and scrabbling, and then one of their horses came cracking through the underbrush, trailing her rider whose boot was stuck in the stirrup, and oh — such a sight I never saw: this man gashed from throat to gut, opened like a tin of sardines, all blood and offal and the horse’s wild eyes turning, and foam at her mouth, and more screaming, and crashing, and one of them crying Please over and over until he stopped.
I heard my heart in my head, heavy-heaving, and dread swelled in my stomach like I’d swallowed a bellows, and then I heard snapping, as bones, and lapping, as blood, and I turned and I vomited, quiet as I could but not quiet enough, for the sounds of that barbarous feast ceased as if on command. Then, filling my ears with their ill intent: slow steps, breaking twigs and shushing leaves, steps laden with a baleful purpose, and I felt hot breath in my ear, and I smelled raw meat, mephitic and sour and coppery, and in that moment between my wayward life and my soon-to-be gruesome death, I heard my God-given name, Eileen Archer, in the mouth of this monster beside me, and as though possessed by calamitous fever I appealed to Frankie’s vengeful occult, and I squeezed my eyes shut, and I clenched the knife entwined in its bloody silk lilacs, and I whispered Frankie please it wasn’t me
I woke at dawn, shivering, the hunting knife still in my hand, the satchel still between me and the cedar. I checked my side: the blood had clotted and dried; it was a mess, but I was alive.
Through that early haze I saw the horse from last night, grazing in a clearing, blessedly free of her terrible cargo. I found my feet and approached her. The saddle was still damp with gore, but I didn’t care; I couldn’t leave this wretched place soon enough. I hefted the satchel onto the mare’s flank and fastened it down, then hoisted myself astride. I unwound the lilacs from my knife and fixed them around the pommel, everything slaughter-stained, and all on account of that satchel full of gold strapped behind me: such small reason, when you think on it. And in the great scheme of life’s manifold unnaturalities, insofar as I have seen, such small compensation.
I wanna thank you all so much for being here, and for listening week after week; and thanks for getting super haunted this month alongside me! [laughs] If you like what’s happening here at Little Oracles, share an episode with somebody; leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen. We’ve got more big book energy and creativity content over on Instagram (at) little oracles, and on the blog at little oracles dot com. And, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!
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